I missed out on the ACA630 production run but got to buy the ACA620 later. It is a fantastic and very affordable card, but it lacks in CPU power to run OS3.9.

So I decided to recreate the feeling of OS3.9 on regular OS3.1 to the best of my ability within the confines of the available hardware. I am running on 800x600 resolution through IndivisionECS in 8 colours. I started with basic MWB palette and changed it a little bit to accomodate somewhat more natural colours.

After that I started recreating glowicons using that palette and saving them as regular Amiga icons, dithering each image, selected and glowing, one by one, through Personal Paint and saving them through the basic 3.1 IconEdit tool. Yes, I am nuts. But implementing regular glowicons would mean slow loading since the palette is allocated dynamically while that is not the case with oldskool type of icons.

Some icons still looked awful, for example that of a green drawer, so I redesigned them a little bit to look better.

Next, I proceeded to adapt some of my own photographs for desktop background purposes, by resizing and dithering each patiently through PPaint with the available palette. Some example results can be seen attached below... It's all dithered to hell and back but I think it looks pretty good on the whole considering it's only 8 colours while speed and responsiveness are there too. (popout the image when viewing it here on the form to avoid distortion).

Next, I load PeterK's redesigned icon.library. Man, it rocks! It speeds up icon loading: they popup immediately when double clicking on the compact flash drive icon. As a bonus, it also provides compatibility with newicons and glowicons.

Upon bootup there is 1.6 MB Chip RAM free, there is basic internet functionality (sufficient for downloads through Aminet), FTP for my own local storage etc.

All in all, a massive waste of time but I had tons of fun doing it. That never happens when I do anything at all on Windows. As they say, time well wasted.